BIOANTIQUES: These slides of stained blood droplets date to the 1940s and contain strains of the malaria parasite that are now extinct.COURTESY OF CARLES ARANDA
The Ebro Delta is a low, marshy region in Catalonia, Spain, that borders the Mediterranean Sea—prime land for growing rice, but also perfect mosquito habitat. Like much of Europe, the area was long burdened with malaria until mosquito-control efforts following the Second World War drove down infection rates, eradicating the local strain of the parasite by 1964.
Decades later, scientists, like investigators at a crime scene, are trying to recover evidence of this lost European strain of malaria. The unicellular parasites responsible for the disease, Plasmodium spp., originated in Africa, scientists believe, and dispersed around the world by hitching rides in their human hosts. Just as globe-trotting humans fanned out from Europe in the colonial era, the now-extinct European strains of Plasmodium played a key ...
